You must have faced situations where some crappy website would have changed your default home page in Internet Explorer to their own home page. Such websites are mostly full of spyware programs and their main purpose is to stuff your computer with spyware which will gather important data and send it to the person behind those websites.

To stop such activities either you can manually check the default home page to the one that you prefer after every site that you visit or else you can use this little trick.

Right Click on the Internet Explorer icon on your desktop and then click “Properties”. Now in the target field the text which you will find is:

“F:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE”

All you need to do is append the URL which you want to be your default home page in Internet Explorer. Like if I want this blog of mine to be my default home page then all that I will do is add www.nofullstop.com to the above URL (with a space between the two). Finally it will look something like this:

“F:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE” www.nofullstop.com

Now the entry in Home Page section of Options window will be overridden and hence even if some website changes the default home page of yours still your home page will remain what you actually want it to be.

Like firefox you can add any custom search in Google Chrome. Here I will teach you how to add any custom search to Google Chrome and we will take the example of Wikipedia search and Google translate to understand it more clearly. As you can see in the image above, in my Google Chrome when I add wiki in the omnibox then I am asked to press “tab” and then type the search term. Now hit enter and wikipedia search page opens with the results.

Procedure to add custom search to your Google Chrome

Open the website which already has a search box and which provides the search feature. Copy the URL

Like in wikipedia when you search for something in their search bar then you get this URL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=

Next to search= are the keywords which you searched in wikipedia. But you need to delete those keywords and all that is of important is the URL shown above.

Right Click in the omnibox (address bar) and click on ‘Edit search engines’. Now click on ‘Add’ button and then you will be asked to fill three text fields.

In the current example of Wikipedia here is what you have to enter:

Name: Wikipedia
Keyword: wiki (this is what you type in the omnibox so as to search wikipedia)
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s (you need to append %s next to the URL so that Google Chrome could convert that URL to default search engine)

Similarly, for Google Translator here is what you need to enter:

Name: Google Translate (English)
Keyword: translate
URL: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=%s

Now you can repeat the procedure for any website which offers custom search.

Google Chrome tricks have turned out to be very useful for today’s webmaster although similar alternatives are available for FireFox users but the attractive graphical interface of Google Chrome is much better.

If you are a webmaster and you want to scrutinize your website in terms of the size of various images, scripts, objects and their loading times then you can use Google Chrome to get this information with just few clicks.

Open the webpage that you want to analyze, right click on the webpage, click on “Inspect element”, choose “Resources” tab and reload the webpage. This will display all the details related to that webpage. You can sort the details using loading time or size of scripts / images.

Similar to FireFox, Google chrome also has many about:internets easter eggs which can provide you better control over your Google Chrome installation. Here I have listed all the Google Chrome easter eggs which might be of your help and will keep updating the post as I come to know about more of these.

All you need to do is type about:<easter egg name> and hit enter. Let me list all those that I could collect. Thanks to Techzilo for the inspiration.

about:crash

Well, it won’t help you recover from crash but it actually will crash Google Chrome. Once you type this and hit enter then you will be greeted with the Google Chrome ’sad tab’ image shown below.

about:internets

This isn’t of any real use and it just displays the famous pipes screensaver of windows. See the image below.

about:hang

Well, this is the easter egg that will actually help you recognize the tab which is creating problems and later on close it.

about:dns

This will make Google Chrome prefetch the DNS records for 10 hostnames which are frequently being visited.

about:network

Type this in omnibox, hit enter, click on “Start I/O tacking” and then open a new website in another tab. You will see the links to all images, objects, scripts etc. of that website in this about:network omnibox.

about:memory

This will help you compare the memory being used by various browsers that are open at that time and compare that memory use with that of Google Chrome

about:plugins

This is used to know more about the plugins that are installed with Google Chrome. With plugins I mean flash player, real player etc. and not the extensions which are installed firefox.

about:stats

Every minute detail which is running with Google Chrome is displayed with this page.

about:histograms

This will list many histograms that which reveal the internal working of Google Chrome.

about:cache

This will list the sites that have been cached by Google Chrome.

about:version

You guessed it right. It displays the current version of Google Chrome. Remember to check for latest Google Chrome builds using this small app.

And you can get a comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts for Google Chrome over here.

This is something that most of us have been waiting for but I just don’t know why people behind WordPress never included the Automatic Updates feature in their earlier versions.

Their was a time when I was so much afraid of upgrading WordPress manually or using some plugin which will help me upgrade WordPress automatically that I didn’t upgrade WordPress for 1 year straight. It was a month back that somehow I decided to use DreamHost’s One Click WordPress update feature and voila! It took hardly took me 2 minutes to upgrade my WordPress to the latest version.

Still, for those who don’t use DreamHost as their hosting company and for those who are afraid of upgrading WordPress manually, this new feature of Automatic WordPress Upgrade will surely be a life saver.

You can check the list of all the features of WordPress 2.7 here.